Jay Lake - Green

“Girl,” she finally said. “Your thoughts are your own. I do not blame you for a syllable of what you said. But if you value your life, and any power you may ever hope to grasp hold of, keep those words within you and never let them out again among these walls.”

Her words were a scrap of hope fed to a starving girl. “Yes, Mistress,” I muttered, then pulled away from the fur and cotton of her shoulder. “What is it you are here to teach me, please?”

She looked surprised. “Why, dancing, of course.”

We danced awhile.

I could not see how to make another belled silk and keep it a secret. Instead I began sewing one in my imagination. Each night before I slept, I would count the bells of my life to date. First there were the simple tin bells of my time with Papa. Then there were the scrap iron bits of my voyage with Federo. Then there were the pomegranate seeds of my months in this house.

In my mind they all rang, even the wood and iron bits. Each night after I had counted them all to the best of my recollection-some spans of days I had to guess at-I would make a game of sewing another one on. Because it was only in my head, I could use needles of bone or ivory, steel or wood; likewise the thread was as I decided it was.

The important thing was to keep the count. In the Pomegranate Court, weeks were marked by the pattern of daily lessons, and by the delivery of certain foodstuffs. We kept no calendars. The count of my bells was the count of my days, and how else would my spirit know the way home when I was done with my life?

I never breathed a word, said nothing to anyone, even the Dancing Mistress. I could not do this thing without punishment falling so hard upon my shoulders that I would bleed rivers.

Even so, she was a hidden friend to me through the darkest days of my second winter and the wet, gloomy opening of the spring that followed. The one hour of any day where I could speak even the least portion of my mind was in the practice room with her. We worked on steps, balance, how I walked, my sense of my body and the space it filled. Sometimes it was truly dance, but more often it was just movement.

“Most people think of their bodies as being flat, like a drawing of themselves,” she told me. “Imagine that you made a paper poppet, and moved it about on a little stage. Except it’s not at all true. You have depth. Your heels and elbows swing back. When you turn, there is a curve your body fills in the space around you.”

While the words made sense to me, it was hard to understand the idea that lay beneath. She set me to skipping rope-a pastime of which I had never heard-first forward, then backwards. To hop as the rope came down behind me required that I know without looking where both the rope and my feet were.

This was much like Mistress Tirelle making me pick fruit with a single glance, or Mistress Leonie’s endless tutelage on the niceties of seams. I had to see beyond what lay before my most casual gaze, to what was really there, as invisible to the eye as my own back was.

These lessons were strange, and quiet, but soon enough I could feel the grace they lent me. I could catch a dropped knife in the kitchen before it struck the tile, leap down the stairs from the balcony to the lower porch. I found I was strong, too. Very strong, the Dancing Mistress told me-more even than most boys. How was I to know? She helped me learn to use that advantage as well. Once the weather cleared a bit, I was able to climb the pomegranate tree speedily and without fear.

For that feat I was beaten so hard, I could not walk for two days. Mistress Tirelle and the Dancing Mistress had an argument, the only one I ever heard between them. Then the duck woman came waddling into my sleeping room. “This is your place,” she said quietly. “Do not look over the walls, do not peek out the gate.”

I forgot myself again and blurted out, “What is beyond, that I should fear it so?”

Mistress Tirelle pretended not to notice my infraction. “A world you will see when it is your time. Girl, you are being made ready for greatness. Let that making unfold in the way your teachers know best.”

Like Federo, she believed my being here was for the good of all. How could they think such a thing?

Spring became summer, the rhythms of the seasons continuing to mark my time in the Pomegranate Court. All I remembered from my earliest days was the endless heat and the sun pouring like a golden hammer upon the land. Here the heavens were a clock, a slow march of the long now following the course of plowing, planting, harvest, and fallow.

Not that I’d seen agriculture. Only my one pomegranate tree carrying its hidden burden of seeds, now lost like my bells, but far more likely to return. Once the art of reading had settled into my head, Mistress Danae showed me ever more books. Among them was a treatise on farming, The New Horse-Houghing Husbandry. This was the first truly old text I’d read. The book took me weeks on end to puzzle through, and I understood perhaps only one part in five.

Still, I had been born into the practice of farming. Papa and Endurance worked the paddies, brought in the rice, trod the husks. I recognized some of what Tullius, the author of this book, was describing. My interest was born of that-an echo of the familiar, mixed with stories of princes and battles and demigods and the colors of the world.

The other thing I learned from Husbandry was that the very speech of people could change over time. There were seasons to language, just as there were seasons to the years or to the lives of women. I went about for a while muttering in archaic Petraean, though I never had the nerve to answer Mistress Tirelle or my other instructresses in that form.

My lessons moved downstairs as well. We began cooking in the great kitchen more often. The selection of vessels, utensils, spices, and cooking methods was much more varied than upstairs. Mistress Tirelle and I broke our fasts there almost all the time. Some days we also took quick, simple midday or evening meals there. More to the point, downstairs was where I explored what could be done with food. The lessons were simple at first, but it was already clear to me that there might be no end to them if someone had the means to spend their lives in a glorious kitchen.

One day we were washing earth pears-small wrinkled lumps with purplish skins and hair-fine roots branching off them.

“This root must be cooked over a hot fire or on a high boil for at least ten minutes,” Mistress Tirelle said.

Nothing was ever written down. I was simply expected to remember. The array of details in the kitchen was staggering.

I clasped my hands briefly. This was how I indicated I wished to ask a question regarding whatever lesson was under way.

“You may speak, Girl.”

“What will happen if it is eaten raw, or poorly cooked?”

She gave me a long look. “A person could become quite ill, or even perish.”

It had never occurred to me that food could be a weapon. “So the earth pear is harmful?”

Mistress Tirelle put down her root and dried her hands. “Girl, your question runs ahead of your learning, but I will answer it nonetheless. Everything can do harm. The oils we use for frying would ruin your digestion if drunk down like wine. If I made you eat salt until you gorged, you would die of thirst soon after. Some herbs, or things that resemble herbs, can kill even as a small pinch of powder.”

“Then this art is like all the others I study.” I waved the earth pear in my hand to point around the great kitchen. “It is not that I should cook. It is that I should know cooking so well that I can see when someone is trying to poison me with salt or bad oils or the powder of killing herbs.”

Mistress Tirelle’s ghost of a smile briefly returned. “Federo chose you well, Girl.”